5 ms·

Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing". All housing on th

by cyberax 3mo ago

Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing". All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing. Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.

randomblock1 3mo ago
By your definition a Lamborghini is affordable, because someone can afford it. I don't think that holds up.
- cyberax 3mo ago
  Yes, it is. That's why "affordable" is a bad term. There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing. To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
ajmurmann 3mo ago
How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas
- robomartin 3mo ago
  > How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly. The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe. So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do. That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
  - vel0city 3mo ago
    The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is <1. The average for a regular passenger car is >1. Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
    - eagleinparadise 3mo ago
      You're not factoring in the unused capacity of a regular car parked on the street or in a garage versus being in service of delivering transportation value.. The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher. Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality. I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization. But yes, traffic is indeed an impact. The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
      - vel0city 3mo ago
        An unused car parked isn't causing traffic jams on the highway. It's irrelevant to my comment that AVs increase traffic, not decrease traffic. I agree reducing parking needs is a benefit to AVs, but arguing it will reduce congestion is ignoring extremely basic traffic concepts. You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
      - hibikir 3mo ago
        The actual savings are minimal at best, as demand for cars is all about peak, and how the peak travels typically in similar directions. You see this in trains. In downtown SF, you will find trains parked near the stadium all day, because there is no,practical use for them 9p% of the day. Most of the fleet is idle most of the day, and it would not be any better if it's a self driving car. You'd have a much better chance if trips were random, but they absolutely aren't. The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
- cyberax 3mo ago
  Right now the average car occupancy during the rush hour is ~1.5 persons per car. By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity. This will completely resolve the congestion in the majority of metro areas, even with induced traffic. No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
  - jakintosh 3mo ago
    > By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that? The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all. Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same. So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
    - cyberax 3mo ago
      > Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal. The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible. But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot. > Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that? Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.
eagleinparadise 3mo ago
I actually hate the term affordable housing because you're right, its not affordable. The wood, concrete, roof, and mechanical system costs about the same all things considered whether you're renting for $5k/mo or $500/mo. I make the same point it should be called subsidized housing too.
javascriptfan69 3mo ago
>Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities. Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.

by cyberax 3mo ago

randomblock1 3mo ago

By your definition a Lamborghini is affordable, because someone can afford it. I don't think that holds up.

cyberax 3mo ago
Yes, it is. That's why "affordable" is a bad term. There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing. To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.

ajmurmann 3mo ago

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

robomartin 3mo ago
> How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly. The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe. So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do. That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
- vel0city 3mo ago
  The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is <1. The average for a regular passenger car is >1. Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
  - eagleinparadise 3mo ago
    You're not factoring in the unused capacity of a regular car parked on the street or in a garage versus being in service of delivering transportation value.. The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher. Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality. I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization. But yes, traffic is indeed an impact. The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
    - vel0city 3mo ago
      An unused car parked isn't causing traffic jams on the highway. It's irrelevant to my comment that AVs increase traffic, not decrease traffic. I agree reducing parking needs is a benefit to AVs, but arguing it will reduce congestion is ignoring extremely basic traffic concepts. You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
    - hibikir 3mo ago
      The actual savings are minimal at best, as demand for cars is all about peak, and how the peak travels typically in similar directions. You see this in trains. In downtown SF, you will find trains parked near the stadium all day, because there is no,practical use for them 9p% of the day. Most of the fleet is idle most of the day, and it would not be any better if it's a self driving car. You'd have a much better chance if trips were random, but they absolutely aren't. The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
cyberax 3mo ago
Right now the average car occupancy during the rush hour is ~1.5 persons per car. By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity. This will completely resolve the congestion in the majority of metro areas, even with induced traffic. No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
- jakintosh 3mo ago
  > By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that? The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all. Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same. So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
  - cyberax 3mo ago
    > Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal. The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible. But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot. > Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that? Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.

eagleinparadise 3mo ago

I actually hate the term affordable housing because you're right, its not affordable. The wood, concrete, roof, and mechanical system costs about the same all things considered whether you're renting for $5k/mo or $500/mo. I make the same point it should be called subsidized housing too.

javascriptfan69 3mo ago

>Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities. Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.